XP SP2 stealing disk space

Chippy_Minton

Blacksheep1979 wrote:

Is your pagefile set to one size or is it variable - its much better to keep a fixed sized of aprox 3072mb.

3072 MB is far too big for a typical page file. It's a waste of disk space, though not such an issue with the massive hard drives these days. You probably wouldn't set it to that size even if the machine had 6 GB of RAM. The OP's page file of 768 MB indicates he has 512 MB of RAM (default page file size is 1.5 x RAM), so that's about right.

See Sizing the page file for more information.

Madiba wrote:

I have 2GB of DDR2 and XP still insists on using my harddisk as virtual memory.

I dont have SPII on my Xp machine

Windows allows you set no paging file, or at least SP2 does.

navig8r

Cheers for the usefull links and tips..I have now found the answer..When reporting the properties of C: windows takes into account the size allocated to system restore and adds it to the amount of space used by the files and folders..

Dave

navig8r

Cheers for the usefull links and tips..I have now found the answer..When reporting the properties of C: windows takes into account the size allocated to system restore and adds it to the amount of space used by the files and folders ..

Dave

Blacksheep1979

Chippy_Minton wrote:

3072 MB is far too big for a typical page file. It's a waste of disk space, though not such an issue with the massive hard drives these days. You probably wouldn't set it to that size even if the machine had 6 GB of RAM. The OP's page file of 768 MB indicates he has 512 MB of RAM (default page file size is 1.5 x RAM), so that's about right.

See Sizing the page file for more information.

Windows allows you set no paging file, or at least SP2 does.

So the less ram you have the less page file you have and the more ram the more page file? I think you need to reread what pagefiles are used for as that is exactly the opposite of what you should do.

If your computer had 6gb of ram (not that most mobos can actually have that) then for a start xp wouldn't be able to address any more than 4gb and you'd also lose another 1-1.25gb through xp being rubbish and unable to address memory properly anyway. Ignoring those points with 6gb of ram the need for a pagefile would almost be zero, you'd probably set it at a low amount such as 200mb just to be on the safe side.

The reason I said to set the pagefile so large is that normally it is dynamically allocated and the constant resizing of it fragments the harddrive and slows opperations down. If you are looking at large media files and maybe doing other work 3gb will be enought to cover any eventuallity.

redux

navig8r wrote:

Cheers for the usefull links and tips..I have now found the answer..When reporting the properties of C: windows takes into account the size allocated to system restore and adds it to the amount of space used by the files and folders ..

Dave

... and the Recycle Bin as well, I think, which really doesn't need to be 12 or 20% of the drive